Queen Bird

Sam Grieve

On the morning of the Princess’s baptism, the Queen wakes up early. Through the closed casement and thick tapestry, she hears a blackbird’s song. Dawn must be breaking. The Queen turns on her side and folds her knees up to her chest, around the weight of her heart.

“Sing again,” she begs silently. “Sing again.”

#

The Queen’s bedchamber is dark, as it has been for weeks, ever since it was sealed up and hung with arras, ready for her confinement. The Queen had entered it willingly then and put up a good show, laughing with her women and demanding little pleasures that might please the King were he to hear of them: fine cuts of meat for the prince that grew in her belly; an ointment of calendula for the bruises he caused with his strong kicking.

What she kept secret was how much she needed the reprieve. From the tyranny of court life, from Henry and his temper.

The servants had lit a thousand candles for her, and light radiated off the gleaming, golden walls. The Queen settled herself on the bed while her ladies plumped the bolster and laid feather cushions all about her.

“I am a bird in my nest,” she told them. “Until the prince is born, I am to be Queen Bird.”

The ladies tittered. The Queen smiled. Then the door was shut. The Queen reclined on pillows and rubbed her huge, egg-like belly. Deep inside her, her son hiccupped. The pleasure and relief she felt masked the fear of what was to come. Women died having babies. Even queens.

#

But now, six weeks later, the Queen is not just miraculously alive but a mother, albeit to a girl. Yet she must still stay in this room, forty days at least, until she is churched. The Queen squeezes her eyes shut to hold back the tears. She is sick of the gloom and of the flicker and smell of the beeswax candles that barely illuminate it. She is sick of her ladies and their conversations, and she is sick herself—of her smell and the dank, dark blood staining her rags, her loose flub, the ooze of her. She is even sick of the cloth of gold, fit only for the Queen. She longs for the body she had before—her small, bright body.

#

The Queen was so slight as a child that her mother called her mon petit oisillon. She was a bird and her sister was a mare, wide-hipped, with rippling, golden hair. Her mother loved the bird in her, her pretty sheen. Her delicacy. The way she danced on her toes. How she enchanted everyone but was (almost) impossible to catch.

#

The mare, on the other hand, worried her mother. The way men stared at her. The way she walked away from them, swinging her rump. Her mother feared that the mare would disgrace them all.

#

Long before the Queen was a queen, she lived in France, and she did not think much about being a bird. In fact, she did not think about it at all, except once, near Blois, when she tumbled off a horse as it took a low hedge. She should have landed on the stony path and done harm to herself, but instead the bird came out. She was falling and then she was not. The air snatched her up; in an instant she saw a path to the stars. And then she was on the ground, upright, uninjured, white butterflies unfurling around her from the yellow gorse.

She had stood there while her white-faced squire caught the bridle of her mount, opening and closing her hands.

“Did you see?” she asked him. “Did you see?”

The boy had not seen the bird. He had seen his lady fall and land uninjured. A miracle.

#

The Queen sits up and shoves her covers down. Her ladies sleep. In the murk she cannot see them, but she knows where they are: Lady Rochester sprawled on her back in the corner, arms above her head, breath whistling past her yellow teeth; the Countess of Hull curled up like a child, so silent she might be dead; Lady de Vere sweat-sheened and fretful in the corner, covers on the floor; the flatulent Mistress Jacoby.

The Queen slides her legs over the edge of the bed. Beneath the bolsters of goose-down and the wool sheeting, the straw rustles, and the Queen freezes, swallowing down the sudden grip of fear that rings her throat.

#

So why was the Queen a bird only once in France but many times in England?

#

For seven years being a girl, a Fille d’Honneur, was enough, the Queen believes. She loved her pious mistress, Claude, who liked everything just so. She loved the other filles, her heart’s sisters. And she particularly loved how loved she was in return—for her neat embroidery, her good temper, her courtly manners, her dark, pretty looks.

She was not a marchioness then, or a king’s desire, or a queen. She was just Anne—funny, flighty Anne. At night she amused La Reine and the other girls, organizing midnight feasts, card games, and little performances. The girls lay on their counterpanes, giggling, eating marchpane and drinking watered wine. Their hair hung untethered down their backs—they talked about young men they admired, the homes they wished for. They dreamt about their future happiness. Most of them, Anne included, never realized that this was the happiest they would ever be.

#

And then a letter, from England, scented of damp and blood. She was to be married; a husband waited over the sea. She lay in her bed and shivered, tried to imagine him, this Irish cousin, but all she could see was a cage with an open door.

#

The wind blew against the tide, the sea frothed with whitecaps. Anne stood on the stern, wrapped in a wool cloak and watched France glide away. Gulls floated in the breeze behind them like trailing ladies’ maids. She followed their wheeling, dipping flight, and her heart rose and plummeted with them.

Why could she not be a bird, she thought, free to do whatever she liked?

And even as she thought it, bird she became. She found herself above the foaming water, rising on an updraft, the ship, tinderbox small in the great pewter ocean, sailing away.

The sky pulled her. She understood she could go anywhere—there was no right way—no father, no husband, no pope, no king, no god even, and her joy rose inside her like a wave and burst out.

Caw! she screamed. Caw!

#

After that she was often bird. Not when she was happy, of course (dancing or teasing) but when she was not. When her stomach ached and she couldn’t sleep and she felt twitchy, when she sensed the danger around her. Then she became bird; she could not help herself. When her marriage prospect fell through, her father sent her to court, and before long several suitors desired her. She fluttered around them, keeping them out of reach. At night she flew out of her window, over the city. Sometimes she was an owl, snatching rats in the pleasure gardens with her rake-like claws; at other times a nightingale, trilling outside the Queen’s window.

She could not hide her birdness—the essence of it. She did not want to be held, and yet this was exactly what her suitors wanted from her. It was the bird that drew them to her, after all, not the girl.

#

The Queen stands in the dark in her stuffy chamber. The dark presses down on her like a pie casing. Beyond it she feels the weight of the palace and beyond that, the whole of England. It feels like her husband is lying on top of her, smothering her with his hot weight, his grunting, dispassionate need. The distasteful, fleshy smell of him. She curls her arms around her aching, bound breasts.

This is the conundrum. This fetid, dark prison or him, her lord and master, back to begetting in her bed.

#

Outside the blackbird calls, a cascading trill. The Queen’s heart flutters in her chest. For seven years she flitted around the King, did not let him snare her. Mostly she was a woman, but sometimes she was a bird, and it drove him wild, even when she pecked at him, nipped at him. But, in the end, he caught her. He paid a heavy price. But she paid a price too. A Queen cannot be a bird. A Queen is the least free thing.

#

But that blackbird, summoning. The Queen stands in the dark and weeps. Her bound breasts ache. She thinks of the princess, away with her nurse. She weeps more. She does not want to be a queen. She does not want to be a wife or woman. She wants to be a bird, outside, under the sky.

#

And then, just like that—she is. Air—clean and brisk—fills her lungs. The world is color, almost bewildering after the darkness. She digs her scaled feet into the wet bark of a beech. She ruffles her feathers. Cool wind tickles her skin. Above her the clouds are nacreous with light. She is filled to the brim with exuberant, rushing delight.

A movement catches her attention—it’s the male blackbird, flown down to her. He struts along the branch behind her, chest out, a warble of pure song pouring from his beak.

The Queen laughs. The wind buffets her fragile bones like water. She opens her wings and soars, darts from one branch to another. Behind her the cock follows, silent in flight but bursting into tune each time he lands. She leads him around a bit and then drops down onto the grass. Light refracts off cobwebs strung with dewdrops. The Queen sees colors she did not know existed. She cocks her head: It couldn’t be, but yes, below the roots the sludgy glide of a worm is softly audible, almost under her claws now. For a moment she waits, and she stabs, piercing the loam with her beak and wrenching the worm out. It hangs in the air, still writhing, then, with a couple of swift flicks, she swallows it down. After all the rich food she has eaten recently, the parfaits and jellied eels and coddled eggs, this meal tastes heavenly, of the earth and iron and freshly mown grass.

Behind her the cock preens himself, his tail a gleaming fanfare above his head.

“Shoo,” says the Queen, and the word comes out in a chirrup. “Get you gone, good sir. I cannot make a nest with you. I am the Queen.”

#

When they put her in the tower, she might have flown away but she does not. Like a hawk held down with jesses, she is tethered to the hope that her husband might forgive her and to her red-haired daughter. But when she watches her brother killed outside her window, she cannot help it—she becomes a wild thing, flapping around her room, beating her head against the panes until her women hold her down and calm her.

Soon they will come for her. In a day, she is told. Then it is to be two. The Queen lies in her bed through  the long nights, shivering. She imagines herself a nightjar flitting along the riverbank, over the sour stink of the houses, up into the clean pull of the air. She thinks of her sister, the mare, and her shameful acquiescence. She thinks of herself, those unjust charges, how she despises being held.

#

But still she does not become a bird, even at her most afraid. It is only when they lead her to the scaffold and blindfold her—when they pull the sword from the hay and let it fall toward her neck like a silver wing—does she buckle, folding into that familiar, feathered body that has resided within through her whole life before plummeting upward and away, into the blinding glare of the sun.

Writer’s Notebook

“Queen Bird” did not begin as a short story. I wrote the scene of Anne Boleyn turning into a blackbird about twenty years ago, as part of a YA novel I have been laboring over. I recently picked up this work again and the scene jumped out at me—Anne, with all her trappings of power, yet utterly powerless. Her body not her own. Suddenly I needed to explore her further. I needed to set her free. 

I write fiction for the most part, and a significant percentage of it could be classified as speculative. I like to tiptoe in the liminal space between what is perceived as realistic human experience and an alternative way of  exploring universal truths. We will never know what really went on in Anne’s head but for anyone who has ever felt trapped, for whatever reason—by the cruelty and inequality of the law, restrictive social paradigms, familial expectation, mental health, etc.—perhaps they too have felt the bird flap within them. 

Thank you so much to the editors of COUNTERCLOCK for choosing this story. Despite the darkness hovering in the “wings,” I loved writing it—and it is an absolute privilege to share it with the world. 

About the writer